Words not to remember in November 2008.

1. Wow — it’s Historic Election time!

Well, maybe, but also maybe not. The media always like to jump the gun on this “historic” stuff. We only learn what’s actually historic in looking back.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Sen. Arlen Specter, at age 78 suffering from cancer, was feeling miserable Monday following chemotherapy the previous Friday. But believing the best antidote was hard work, Specter took the Senate floor with a speech different in kind from the partisan oratory now customary in the chamber.

Now that Senator Barack Obama has become the Democrats’ nominee for President of the United States, to the cheers of the media at home and abroad, he has written a letter to the Secretary of Defense, in a tone as if he is already President, addressing one of his subordinates.

Listening to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton repeat stories they claim to have been told by the poor and the unemployed, who are unable to pay for food and medicine and feel miserable about it, is enough to make one think we are living in a Third World dictatorship and not the United States of America. But victimhood and a “can’t do” spirit is what the Democratic Party has mostly been about since the Great Depression.

Does any of this sound familiar? A Democratic presidential nomination is essentially taken away from a candidate because of a fight over delegates’ credentials at a national nominating convention.

Let’s do a thought experiment asking whether Americans are for or against slavery.

You might say, “What are you talking about, Williams? We fought a war that cost over 600,000 lives to end slavery!”

The congregation of Christ Our Shepherd Lutheran Church in Peachtree City is dealing with joy and sorrow as their senior pastor, the Rev. John Martin Weber, 62, retires from 34 years of service to the community, both through the church and through Peachtree City’s fire and police departments as chaplain. He is believed to have the longest tenure among clergy in Peachtree City.

Stress experts will tell you that there are two kinds of stress: eustress and distress. Eustress is the good stress that motivates us to get tasks underway and completed. Distress is bad stress that occurs when stressors pile up and become too much to bear.

Local politics is relevant and important. But, sooner rather than later, national and international issues quickly find their way to your front door.

Now that the two parties have finally selected their presidential candidates, it is time for a sober — if not grim — assessment of where we are.

It would behoove all you men to thoroughly understand one thing: we women normally conduct our romances by committee.

The lights flashed on at Candi’s house. They were eyes peering into the darkness of the outside world. Yellow spilled out onto the front lawn and illuminated the green grass and a thick grove of trees, but that wasn’t all. Among the shadows of the pines, seven wide-eyed teenagers stood frozen like deer caught in headlights – and I was one of them.

“I intend to proudly vote for Obama,” said a caller to a National Public Radio show, “because I want to show the world what America is all about — that a person of color can become president of the United States.”

In the 1980s I became very active politically. I joined a party, supported candidates, attended party meetings, served as a delegate — and also learned how bitter politics can get, even at the local level.

What assumptions do congressmen make about the American people? Do they assume that we’re dumb or ill-informed about the energy problems we are experiencing?

Frankly, some American with minimal regard for political correctness should consider chasing the so-and-so down the street, cracking an instrument of encouragement associated with Indiana Jones, crying: “Outta here, you bum! And don’t come back!”

It is amazing how seriously the media are taking Senator Barack Obama’s latest statement about the latest racist rant from the pulpit of the church he has attended for 20 years. But neither that statement nor the apology for his rant by Father Michael Pfleger really matters, one way or the other. Nor does Senator Obama’s belated resignation from that church.

A self-identified African-American caller to a Washington, D.C., radio station characterized the recent anti-Hillary Clinton outburst by the white liberal Chicago priest, Michael Pfleger, as a “minstrel show.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In Scott McClellan’s purported tell-all memoir of his trials as President George W. Bush’s press secretary, he virtually ignores Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage’s role leaking to me Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA employee. That fits the partisan Democratic version of the Plame affair, in keeping with the overall tenor of “What Happened.”

It was the biggest night of the young presidential candidate’s campaign. In the South Dakota primary, he had trounced that state’s native son, the sitting vice president, while in California he had just defeated the Minnesota senator who, one week earlier in Oregon, had inflicted his first-ever election defeat.

That headline, while clever, is a little misleading. I am the one trying to get fit with the new Wii Fit. My wife is already in great shape. Just two months after the birth of our daughter, she is already back to her weight before we even had kids. And yes, I am more than a little jealous. I enjoyed all the sympathy weight gain while she was pregnant with our son, Colin (another brownie sundae, dear?), but didn’t get to enjoy any of the calorie draining breast-feeding after he was born.

We frequently brag about the quality of life in Fayette County. Most residents live here because of good schools, the low crime rate, excellent youth sports programs, reasonable taxes and well-managed local governments. There are other factors that influence quality of life, and the presence of excellent programs in the performing and visual arts is of paramount importance.

A friend and I were just talking about this. Talking about how so many people want to write a book.

The reality of the American political system is that, today, a voter has the choice of voting either Republican or Democrat. It would, conceivably, be nice to have a number of valid choices from which to choose when voting. As much as Bob Barr might like it to be so, our next President will either be a Republican or a Democrat.

I don’t normally continue a column from one week to the next. But last week’s column on government accountability and transparency and the need to televise or otherwise have a video recording of public meetings with playback capability deserves a bit more elaboration.

Except for the fire in the trash can, our visit with the grandbabies was uneventful.

Every once in awhile, it’s good for Christians to pause to take a spiritual growth assessment. As Lutheran author Fred Lehr says, “Stifling the maturity process by denying it the fresh air of new insights and knowledge is (an) attachment that ensnares us.”

We continue this week with the Terry family of Coweta and Campbell counties, written and submitted by Nancy Jones Cornell of Fairburn. Nancy is president of the Old Campbell County Historical Society (OCCHS).

I was having breakfast with several area pastors this week and was about to put artificial sweetener into my coffee.

Keith Moore, the senior pastor at Peachtree City’s Dogwood Church, said, “Are you going to put all of that in your coffee?”

As Archie Bunker, in “All in the Family,” used to affirm, “Nixon knows something I don’t know.” It was both a comical and a semilogical way of standing behind the President’s much-berated Vietnam policies.